On September 11th, 2001 Ben Carnell was sitting in a ninth-grade Spanish class as he watched the terror attack unfold. It was then that Carnell knew he was angry about what had gone down and wanted to do something about it. After graduating, he went to the Citadel and played football as a Bulldog. Despite a neck injury he received during his senior year, following graduation Carnell went to basic training and then completed Officer Candidate School before realizing his calling was to be an infantry officer. After being deployed to Europe, he began looking toward the Special Forces, and later completed three years of training at Fort Bragg, including combat diving. His deployment to Afghanistan in 2018 shaped how the rest of his life would play out following being shot 4 times.

Source: Flickr by James Willamor. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)